Citadel and Sentry
by marapozsa
Summary: elzabalthier. Elza is the same as Balthier, but only because they are both running from their dreams.


**Citadel and Sentry**

a c a n t **h a** - c h _a n_

**Authoress' Note & Disclaimer:** Well, the first thing I should tell you is that I'm not actually this perverse. This was just a little product of what was supposed to be an angsty little ficlet where Elza and Balthier are just drinking and confessing silly little things to one another. I don't how it became something so...Unfit to post; and the only reason this isn't rated M is because it's only an inference that they're doing things unworthy of mentioning on a site where kids my age read stuff about their favorite little comic strips. It doesn't actually say so _straight out_, thus the T rating. At any rate, if you don't mind the fact there's explicit-ish content ahead, go and read. Nothing's stopping you except anyone that's spying over your shoulder...Like your parents, babysitter or overprotective older sibling. Especially the parent/guardian thing because I don't want a lawsuit - not from you, Square Enix, or your crazy old dad.

At any rate, the basic information you need to know for this to make sense is that this is AU, Elza is a minor character, and I don't know what color Balthier's eyes really are. In this, not only does Elza actually sort of feel attracted to Balthier, but both Reddas (whom she saw as a father figure) and Rikkun (her friend/sibling/something) are dead. The little moogle-thing that's part of her crew isn't mentioned because it's not as major. In fact, as far as I can tell, that particular moogle only got one line in the entire game and it definitely didn't have a voice-part. Fran is elsewhere, possibly dead or on...er, vacation. Yeah, vacation.

---

Somewhere along the road to the Devil's door, Elza of Balfonheim Port had gone around the bend and left something very important there - something besides her heart, her sanity and her clothes.

Yes, she knows she's half-nude.

_In a bed that definitely isn't her own._

Yes, she realizes just how completely miserable she truly feels.

_Losing the two people in one's life that can actually make one forget what common sense is will do that to a girl._

And yes, she does in fact know just how much she'll regret doing it in the morning.

_No one would regret it more than she would because she's the only one (besides the one she's trying to forget) who really does know better._

Except that's the highlight of a fine evening in Balfonheim's Whitecap Tavern, especially in the higher levels where all the women are whores and all the men are cads. You forget everything there until you walk back out the swinging twin doors, often with a bottle in one hand and the other grasping someone else's shoulder. It's all you want, the loss of memory, the feeling of floating away on clouds made of sin and gin and saltwater.

Rikkun isn't there to pull her out of the tavern anymore on nights she can't take any more and just wants to die. She'd damn herself if she knew how on nights like that because she knows she might as well have been born a slut what with the way she's acting.

Except...she can't.

She's too busy pulling another nameless face under the tangled blue coverlets right now to worry about things like that. Their contours are finally melting together, she having forced him into bed and he having finally relented to her insistency, and Elza's wrapping sanguine fingers into her own burnished tresses even as she nuzzles something pierced she can't quite discern in the dark. She feels something crack but it's only the way they're clunking against the headboard as she becomes even more frantic. He doesn't struggle to keep up with her - in fact, the man who she's sworn should stay nameless seems to be enjoying the animosities she's spouting from those rouge-hued lips ("_Oh, __**fuck**_") and he can keep up with her just fine..._Is he going even faster?_ Oh, by the gods, Elza's just dying by now but she can't feel anything anymore because she's going too fast and now they're both spasming from the effort and they really are going even faster until neither of them can take it anymore and she **has to stop** even though she wouldn't really mind staying like this forever. Motion upon motion upon motion is all she remembers before she collapses and buries herself into a circle of lean strong arms like barricades against all the worries the pirate has ever _had_ to worry.

The feeling of abysmal nothing lasts only until the next morning. It's when she wakes up to find she's leaning against a shoulder attached to a tousled head of copper-hued locks that a new wave of fear attacks the newly reinforced barriers her heart's made. There's a rainbow-hued ring (and another, and another, and another, so many Elza wonders if she might just have helped the man commit adultery with a thousand other women) on the hand resting over her calloused own.

She wrests her naked body away from a pirate that belongs to someone else who deserves it far more than she does.

In another few minutes, Elza finds that most of her clothing is only barely intact; and then she's gone right after she slips into borrowed attire - it's his garb, too, discarded and far too large for her lithe fey frame - stolen from the man she just so happened to have had the pleasure of sleeping with the night before.

...It's only then that Balthier finds that it's safe enough to flutter open eyes the same color as his rococo locks and let a smirk slowly play across his face. For once, it's only one of satisfaction and not victory - like he really and truly does care.

If he really did, though, then it wouldn't be a smirk: it would be a real smile of the sort that he smiles only for another woman and never, ever for Elza.


End file.
